When the ancient Polynesians invented surfing, they often used a paddle to help them navigate. Fast-forward a few millennia, and Stand-Up Paddleboarding, or SUP, finds itself trendy again. Part of its increasing popularity is that standing upright allows surfers to spot waves more easily and thus catch more of them, multiplying the fun factor. Paddling back to the wave becomes less of a strain as well. The ability to cruise along on flat inland water, surveying the sights, is another advantage. Finally, its a good core workout. If youre sold on the idea, schedule an intro SUP lesson, free with board and paddle rental, and you may find yourself riding the waves like a Polynesian king.More

In the past 30 years, light artists have reimagined an art form that has always had the ability to turn the night sky, or a simple window, into luminescence. Last fall, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts turned its southern glass wall into a parade of sound-sensing lights, Lightswarm, that changes with the movements of nearby people and things. Future Cities Lab, the San Francisco design company behind Lightswarm, has originated another notable light sculpture. Located by the YBCA's steps at 701 Mission, Murmur Wall will light up in arresting ways as it incorporates local trending search engine results and social media postings. Onlookers can offer their own contributions, which will feed into the Murmur Wall's data stream and light up the sculpture. What's trending in San Francisco? If you're walking by the YBCA, you can see firsthand — at least through light patterns that reflect the city's volatile internet habits.
Murmur Wall debuts Thursday at 6 p.m. and continues through May 31, 2017, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., S.F. Free; 415-978-2700 or ybca.org. More

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You may measure your true 415 cred by the amount of times you've strolled into the diner that "never close[s]" (as the sign says), sidled up to the bar, ordered a drink, and received a shot of ouzo on the house — without blinking, looking sideways, or feeling the need to keep an open line to flee for the exit.

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San Francisco Film Society held their Film Society Awards Night at Bimbo's on Tuesday, May 7th. Harrison Ford was in attendance accepting the 2013 Peter J. Owens Award. Photographs by Josh Edelson for SF Weekly.

All the Rage

Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard may be powerfully visual, but the writing is off the wall

Sean Penn, in his life as in his acting career, has perfected the art of the brawl. Now he has pretensions not merely to being a director, but an auteur -- of the brawl, naturally. His new movie, The Crossing Guard (he wrote and directed The Indian Runner in 1991), is a hymn to the rootless violence that increasingly fills the streets and newspapers of America. The film features way-big stars (Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston) and enthusiastic direction with a keen eye for rhythmic images. The only thing missing is an intelligent script. Guard is two-dimensional. Looked at from certain angles, it vanishes altogether into celluloid oblivion.

Nicholson plays Freddy Gale, a small-time L.A. jeweler whose 7-year-old daughter was run down and killed by a drunk driver. As the movie opens, the catastrophe is six years in the past -- an interval in which Freddy has broken up with his wife, Mary (Huston), and allowed his life to reduce to a single idea: killing the driver when he's released from prison.

For the movie's first 15 minutes Nicholson speaks in a soft, raspy voice that sounds like a big zipper opening. He seems listless, almost drugged, yet he's still Nicholson, and he still radiates danger. There's no doubt he'll go off eventually -- and he does, at the home Mary now shares with a benign but spineless man named Roger (Robbie Robertson).

Nicholson still gives great tantrum, but as a whole the scene seems farcical, with wooden "fuck"s and "fuck you"s flying around the room like Nerf balls. Penn is obsessed with filming angry people on the mistaken assumption that fury is per se dramatic, but all he manages to prove is that it's not always dramatic. It's clear that Freddy wants to explode and will do so on the smallest pretext; what isn't clear is why he's full of hot, indigestible hate.

The daughter dying tragically, needlessly? Too mechanical. In Penn's screenplay this is just a device, the excuse he needs to let Nicholson do his raging bull in a china shop. The movie implies that the Gales' marriage began to disintegrate because of the child's death, but this theme is never developed -- probably just as well, because exploring it would require a thorough examination of Freddy's character. And he's not a character, just a human volcano overflowing with bitter lava. There's something almost prurient about the way Penn handles Nicholson, hoping to capture on film one of those titanic, forbidden moments of black passion. For Penn, that's the money shot. Everything else is just a means to get there. It's a pornography of anger and violence, but nothing more.

There's something tragicomic in watching Nicholson breathe life into such an inadequate role. Huston, too, far outperforms the script. With her owlish face and shining black eyes, she's as intense in her way as Nicholson, but her role in the film is entirely reactive. She's a punching bag. When Freddy announces his plan to kill the newly freed driver, she doesn't say, "Don't, or I'll call the police, or a psychiatrist." She just stands there, waiting for the explosion she knows is inevitable -- waiting for her chance to explode back. But he has to pop first.

As John Booth, the driver, David Morse is unrecognizably pumped up from his St. Elsewhere days. Like Huston, he's something of a test dummy, waiting for Nicholson to careen into his life. The script gives him little to do except wait to be killed, though he does find a "love interest," JoJo (Robin Wright), a soulful blonde who cosmically commiserates with him between rounds of sex.

Despite the inadequacies of the setup, the movie does move smartly through a nighttime sequence that begins with Freddy's being pulled over for drunk driving. (Nicholson wears, despite the mild weather, what looks to be the same overcoat he wore as Jack Napier in Batman.) Just as the cops are about to slap on the cuffs, Freddy bolts into dark suburban streets and across neatly trimmed lawns.

There is a sweet moment in the bedroom of a little Asian girl, where Freddy briefly takes refuge from the pursuit. She protects him by calmly lying to her father, and Freddy gives her a good-night kiss that's as genuine as it is unlikely. But this glimpse of Freddy's tender side is unconnected to anything else in the movie, and because he's not a man but a violence machine, the exchange doesn't give him the least pause. Moments later he's roaring through the neighborhood toward Booth's trailer, where a chase begins under the sporadic glare of helicopter searchlights (a strikingly L.A. effect Penn seems to have borrowed from Colors).

The movie's ending is embarrassingly mawkish: graveyard, tears, hands held, view of the city lights. Murder-suicide would have made more sense; it would have been truer to Penn's sense of America as a land not of people but of guns and scotch and strip shows and cigarette smoke and small men on vendettas.

One lesson of The Crossing Guard is that Sean Penn shouldn't be writing his own scripts. He's not very good at it, and anyway American directors no longer need to write their own stuff to claim the grand mantle of auteur. Saying that a movie is "by" a director is like starting a sentence with "hopefully" -- regrettable, but there it is. Sean Penn's next film will be "by" him whether he writes it or not.

Penn certainly has talent as an envisioner of shots. His sense of movies is powerfully visual, and that is a necessary if not sufficient skill in making decent pictures. He can let others provide the narrative architecture and the characters in the round.

There's also an unsettling whiff of chumminess in the casting -- Penn and Nicholson, Nicholson and Huston. Apart from the glare of Hollywood insiderdom spoiling the movie's spell of believability, it is a tricky thing to work with friends, lovers, exes. What is good for personal relations is not necessarily good for professional fortunes: It's harder to tell a friend that he's fucked up by, say, writing a bad script. Or that he shouldn't be writing them at all.

The Crossing Guard opens Fri, Dec. 1, at the Bridge in S.F. and the Shattuck in Berkeley.

Slideshows

Sub Pop recording artists 'clipping.' brought their brand of noise-driven experimental hip hop to the closing night of 2016's San Francisco Electronic Music Fest this past Sunday. The packed Brava Theater hosted an initially seated crowd that ended the night jumping and dancing against the front of the stage. The trio performed a set focused on their recently released Sci-Fi Horror concept album, 'Splendor & Misery', then delved into their dancier and more aggressive back catalogue, and recent single 'Wriggle'.
Opening performances included local experimental electronic duo 'Tujurikkuja' and computer music artist 'Madalyn Merkey.'"